International Workshop | Nuremberg, Germany | 8-9 April 2027
Digital transformation is neither placeless nor intangible. It is based on infrastructures, labour processes, and political-economic relations that produce, maintain, circulate, and assign value to data. This is particularly evident in geodatafication: the continuous translation of places, movements, environments, and social relations into standardised and machine-readable spatial data that can be used to calculate, coordinate, predict, and govern.
From platform-based logistics, location-based services to satellite constellations, mapping applications, sensor networks, and civilian/military intelligence, geodata have become fundamental to new forms of accumulation and coordination. Geodata are not simply technical inputs or outputs. They are produced through specific regimes of labour, infrastructure, ownership, and capital accumulation. At the same time, geodata have become central to struggles over value, access, control, and sovereignty across multiple scales, from the workplace to global geopolitical conflicts.
Geodatafication is also transforming the world of work. It encompasses forms of invisible labour in data annotation, cleaning, verification, updating, and infrastructural maintenance; it affords platform and gig work organised through location; it facilitates collaborative and volunteer mapping; it brings about highly specialised forms of geospatial analysis, and; it allows practices of surveillance, intelligence, and military reconnaissance. These heterogeneous labour regimes are embedded in transnational value chains and unequal geographies of resource extraction, data production, and technological expertise. Geodata are produced, processed, and operationalised across dispersed sites by public institutions, corporations, platform workers, volunteers, researchers, and local communities.
The workshop approaches geodatafication as a systemic, multitemporal, interactive, and contradictory transformation connecting digital capitalism, work, and space. It examines how changing relations between labour and technology are linked to new sites and forms of value creation, as well as to contested infrastructures and emerging political economies of spatial data. Bringing together a breadth of geographical, sociological, economic, historical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, the workshop seeks to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the societal conditions and consequences of geodatafication.
We invite conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions addressing topics including, but not limited to:
- the political economy of geodatafication and digital capitalism;
- labour regimes and global value chains in the production of geodata;
- data annotation, cleaning, verification, repair, and other forms of digital maintenance;
- the platformisation of labour and the role of location and geodata in algorithmic management;
- collaborative mapping, volunteered geographic information, and geospatial commons;
- open geospatial data and data commons in the context of AI and GeoAI;
- tensions between commons-based production, commercial platforms, and proprietary AI models;
- the transformation of professional geospatial work through automation and artificial intelligence;
- geospatial infrastructures, including satellite systems, sensor networks, cloud platforms, standards, and mapping services;
- geodatafication in logistics, mobility, urban governance, agriculture, environmental monitoring, and security;
- geodata, surveillance, military intelligence, and geopolitical conflict;
- feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives on geospatial labour and infrastructures;
- critical GIS, critical data studies, labour process theory, science and technology studies, and related conceptual approaches.
We particularly welcome contributions that connect processes usually discussed separately: paid and unpaid labour, professional and volunteer data production, public and private infrastructures, open data and platform capitalism, or everyday practices and geopolitical conflicts. Contributions may focus on specific empirical cases or develop broader conceptual and comparative perspectives.
Workshop format
The event is designed as an intensive workshop rather than a conventional conference. It will bring together approximately 20–30 participants and combine short presentations with extended discussion, thematic sessions, and collaborative work on future research questions.
Selected contributors will be invited to circulate a short position paper of approximately three to five pages before the workshop. The programme will also include a public keynote lecture or panel discussion addressing the broader societal and political implications of geodatafication.
The organisers intend to use the workshop as a basis for further collaborative research and will explore the possibility of a joint publication or thematic journal issue.
Submission
Please submit:
- a title and abstract of approximately 250–300 words;
- a short biographical note of approximately 100 words;
- your institutional affiliation and contact details;
- an indication of whether you require travel or accommodation support.
Proposals should be sent to hannah.boettcher@fau.de AND charlotte.liebel@geo.uni-halle.de by 30 October 2026.
Applicants will be notified by 20 November 2026. Selected participants will be asked to submit their short position papers by 12 March 2027.
There is no participation fee. Meals and refreshments during the workshop will be provided. We aim to offer a limited number of accommodation grants, with priority given to early-career researchers, researchers without access to institutional travel funding, and scholars based at under-resourced institutions, particularly in the Global South. The availability and extent of this support are subject to final funding confirmation.
Background and organisation
The workshop marks the conclusion both of a DFG-funded research project on open geospatial data, led by Georg Glasze and Boris Michel, and of the DFG Priority Programme (SPP) 2267 „Digitalisation of Working Worlds,“ coordinated by Sabine Pfeiffer. It contributes to the development of future collaborative research on the politics, infrastructures, practices, and economies of geodatafication, feeding into a broader interdisciplinary research context on geodatafication being developed across the sites Erlangen, Nürnberg, Halle, and Leipzig.
The workshop is organised by:
Georg Glasze, Sabine Pfeiffer, Boris Michel, Hannah Boettcher, and Charlotte Liebel